5 Minutes with Coby Horowitz

He was the top high school two-miler in Massachusetts the spring of 2010, his senior year at Nashoba Regional High School in Bolton, Mass. But Coby Horowitz spurned Division I coaches and chose to follow his sister Lindsey to Division III Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, that fall. Running was not his first consideration in selecting a school but Horowitz knew it would be an important ingredient of his college experience. He’d met Coach Peter Slovinski and several team members and had confidence he’d fit in well on Bowdoin cross country and track teams.

Now a senior sociology major, Horowitz, 21, has improved steadily at Bowdoin. Despite an admitted aversion to cross country racing, he’s managed three All-American finishes as a Polar Bear harrier. Last fall he used his trademark intelligent pacing to move from 60th at the mile to 45th at two miles, 25th at four miles, and 19th with 800m to go. Horowitz passed another seven athletes during his finish drive to wind up 12th, his third-straight top-15 nationals performance.

On the track, where he feels considerably more at home, Horowitz has focused attention on contributing to Bowdoin’s potent distance medley and 4 x 800m relay teams. Individually he ran everything from the 800m to the 5,000m before developing a passion for the mile and 1500m, even though Horowitz and Coach Slovinski both feel he’s better suited for longer distances. After Horowitz ran a 4:06.85 mile last winter, the prospect of going sub-4:00 this year was suddenly realistic. And during the just-completed indoor season Horowitz dropped his mile best to 4:00.41 in winning the New England Championships on March 1. The mark eclipsed the previous Division III record of 4:00.96, held since 1997 by Karl Paranya of Haverford College. A week later Horowitz ran 4:01.11 to take runner-up honors at the Columbia Final Qualifier at the Armory in New York City. It was on to Division III nationals, where Horowitz prevailed in 4:08.40, slow by his standards but his first individual national title.

Running Times: Congratulations on your record-breaking indoor season and your national championship in the mile. After running 4:00.41 a few weeks earlier, did you expect to take a shot at a sub-4:00 at nationals or did that seem unlikely? I can imagine winning the title was your real concern.

Coby Horowitz: I knew it would be tough to pull off a fast race the day after prelims. I went for it in the first 400, going out just under 60, but then I sort of lost focus the next two laps and went 31 and 31 so I went through the 800 at 2:01 high and I just sort of shut it down and cruised through in 31s the rest of the race. It would have been nice to go for it there at nationals, but I was a little bit too tired from prelims the day before. Winning it was very nice, though.

RT: When did running sub-4:00 mile first enter your mind as a real possibility?

CH: When I was a sophomore in high school and still an 800-meter runner, the mother of one of my friends said she thought I could run a sub-4:00 one day. This was when I was like a 2-flat 800-meter runner, so I didn’t think much about it. My last next two years of high school I ran the two mile, and my first two years of college I was a decent 8K runner and my focus in track was the DMR and the 4 x 8. So it wasn’t until last year when I ran a 4:07 mile that I first thought back to that prediction. A 4:07 is not 4-flat by any means, but I think it would be fun to follow through on it six years after the fact.

RT:Tell me how you got started in the sport and whether you excelled right away or if it was a more gradual process of getting to a high level?

CH: We always played sports growing up and I was a heavy soccer player until my sophomore year of high school and I played baseball and basketball as well. So from age four I was always doing some sport, whatever the season was. And then in sixth grade I picked up cross country and track. Our middle school had a team and my older sister had done it, so I sort of followed in her footsteps. She was faster than I was at first and I hated that, so my first motivation was to be better than her. I ran the 400 and 200 up through eighth grade and then in high school I played freshman soccer in the fall and ran indoor and outdoor track and moved up to the 600 and 800 then. It wasn’t until my junior year that I moved up to the 2-mile and I guess found my place in track. From that point it was always the 2-mile and the 4 x 8 relay double for me, my last two years.

RT:You’ve had a lot of success with the DMR at Bowdoin, including the 2012 national title. Do you get as much satisfaction out of a strong relay team effort as you do from an individual race?

CH: I definitely like relays more. The team aspect makes it more fun and definitely easier to do your best. I treasure that DMR national championship more than this individual victory because I’d trained with those guys for two years, we’d hung out together all the time and we worked for it together. The relays sometimes don’t get as much attention as individual events but I definitely enjoy them a lot.

RT:I know your older sister, Lindsey, attended Bowdoin, which I suspect was a factor in your decision to go there. Were you recruited heavily by any DI schools and did you give any of them serious consideration?

CH: I got a lot of letters from DI schools and I visited a bunch, but I really didn’t want to be in a city and none of those schools appealed to me. Bowdoin is very, very rural—we have three times as many apple trees as people here. I’d visited my sister at Bowdoin with my family and it just felt like a place I’d like to be for four years. I didn’t really get recruited here in the traditional sense and I think Coach Slovenski sort of knew that Lindsey being here was the best pull he would get.

RT:How was the adjustment to the 8K distance in cross country and to DIII competition?

CH: The real difficulty was adjusting to the academics. I had an OK freshman cross country season but the 8K was definitely different and I still thought of myself as a middle-distance runner. But adjusting to the amount of work we have a Bowdoin was really hard. I was sleeping six hours every night and that made it tough to train well. And leaving for meets on Friday afternoon and getting back late Saturday night meant losing basically two full days of homework and I’d try to catch up all on Sunday. So that made my freshman year really rough. And then in outdoor track my 5K PR was like 15-flat which was basically what I ran in high school.

RT:But your DMR team placed fifth at indoor nationals your freshman year, that must have been a highlight.

CH: We set the school record in our first race and then just kept doing better every weekend. Even though we were ranked fifth or sixth going into nationals we all thought we had a chance of winning, so we were actually really disappointed when we got fifth. But we realized with our two oldest guys being juniors we could come back the next year and win it, and it was a lot of fun preparing for it.

RT:You’ve had a lot of success in cross country, with three All-American performances at nationals. So I’m curious whether you think of yourself primarily as a miler year-round, and what sort of view you have of cross country?

CH: Yeah, when I’m in cross country season I definitely think of myself still as a miler. I’ve never really liked the 8K distance but I’ve grown to appreciate it. I still think of it as four miles of killing myself and then I get to race the last mile, which makes it easier for me at least mentally. So I’ve never really thought of myself as a distance runner, even though I think I would probably be better at distance events. I just enjoy the mile as a race a lot more and I decided to make myself into a miler, even though I don’t have the top speed of some of the other guys.

RT: Now that you’ve arrived at your final outdoor season, what’s your outlook about the prospects of a sub-4:00, and have you given much thought yet to the possibility of competing at a high level as a post-collegiate athlete?

CH: We’ll see if we can find a meet that actually has the mile rather than the 1500, so I can have at least one more chance at a sub-4:00 mile. And it’s a runner’s dream to go sub-4. Otherwise I’ll be running a lot of 1500s and 4 x 8s. Our graduation here is during outdoor nationals, so that’s a decision that has to be made but I’m leaning towards attending graduation. As far as running after college, I haven’t given it that much thought. I have a job starting right after school that will make it tough to run at a super high level—I’ll be lobster fishing for six months—so I’ll probably just do a lot of base training and then we’ll see what happens the year after. I usually have trouble motivating myself to run when I’m away from the team and I think I would need a team atmosphere to keep going. But it’s always cool to see how good you can actually be so I would definitely be open to the possibility.

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